How-To Build Landing Pages That Convert

The landing page is the conversion foundation to your lead generation machine. No matter your industry, creating a landing page that conveys a strong offer and incents conversion is critical to driving opportunity. In fact, Marketing Sherpa research points to a 94% effectiveness rating for both B2B and B2C companies leveraging landing pages.

While it's always a good idea to test and evolve your conversion funnel, including your landing page, where should your landing page get started? What are some of the best practices for creating a landing page that converts?

Step 1: Eliminate landing page distractions

The beauty of a landing page is that you can match landing pages toan offer. By the time someone has clicked through to the landing page, chances are good they have a high leverl of interest in whatever you're offering. Why would you create distractions and opportunities for you web user to do anything but complete the action desired on the landing page?

Get rid of anything that's not essential and can potential navigate your user away from your offer. For example, website navigation. Your landing page should focus on the offer and the action you want your visitor to take.

Step 2: Headline/CTA Alignment

People spend about 3 seconds on apage before deciding if it's relevant to them or now. Make sure you reinforce your offer by tying your headline and the call to action together with the same copy.

This copy should be similar to copy that got the user to the page in the first place whether it was an ad, email or something else.

Step 3: Don't Over Crowd

There's nothing worse than a landing page that's trying to do too much. One page, one goal. Stick with the facts necessary to close the deal and nothing more. Write clear, concise copy and don't stray from the intended message.

Offering an ebook? Now is not the time to talk about your product roadmap.

Step 4: Clearly State Your Offer

Clearly articulate what people can expect from your offer. Are they downloading a white paper? What will they know after reading the white paper, that they didn't know before? Are they requesting a demo? What should they expect? Is someone going to call, are they going to get immediate acces? Set and manage the expectations for the offer about to be received.

CONCLUSION:

It can be tempting to load up a landing page with all the latest information about you company and start shouting "Me too!' But don't. Follow the above steps and you'll hit the ground running with a landing page designed to convert right out of the gate. While these are best practices, they aren't designed to replace the insights you'll gain from measuring your own analytics and results. Always be testing. Things like call to action copy, buttons and the number of fields in your form can dramatically change the results.

What are the steps you follow to create a landing page that converts? Leave a comment and let us know your tips for high converting landing pages.